Friday, August 21, 2009

So as I said, my intended guest poster lamed out on me so here we are again. this was supposed to be my two months off.

I'm not going to write too much about this comic because it really doesn't deserve much. Instead of trying to be funny, Randall just throws us some intense cynicism, which I guess is supposed to be the cool, ironic way that young people act now. Almost feels like he is trying to go for a Pictures for Sad Children vibe, like "there is no point to life, let us all be sad together."

Like a lot of people, I was a little confused by it at first, too. Not only because the "kindle" is just a rectangle (unlike the last time you drew one) and when people talk about books we, as a culture, still think of, you know, books, not computers (no matter how much you want it to be the future already). It's because in the first panel, the girl says "Kindle collections are pointless" and then she is like "NO they are pointless in general, collecting anything, because you will die." So why specify "building a kindle collection" then? That's so obnoxious. That's like:

"Why did you dye your hair red and make it all spiky, and attach blue LEDs to the ends of your hair spikes?""Oh, well I know it looks a little weird, yeah...""No I mean in general having hair is stupid."

dammit, if her point is that no matter why you do you will die alone, why the hell start that out by saying "it is pointless to build a kindle collection. Because anything you do in life is pointless. Because you will die alone." What a lousy way to shoehorn us towards a dumb line about pretend existential crises. am I making sense with this?

oh also: GOOMH I READ SOME DISCWORLD BOOKS ONE TIME! i thought i was the only nerd who did that!

update: Coviza points out below that Mr. Evans warned us the date may not work for guest posting, BUT when I e-mailed Mr. Evans to organize all this, I said the first available date was August 19th for comic 625, and he said, to quote what he thought was a private e-mail, "That date sounds good for me." END QUOTE. However, he did promise that in exchange for letting him blog he would draw a picture of me arm-wrestling a dinosaur (and winning). And he did, to be fair, send me that. And I should, to be fair, share it with the world. SO:

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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